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PASTE, SUET, FOR BOILED PUDDINGS (another way)
Pick and chop very fine half a pound of beef suet, add to it one pound and a quarter of flour, and a little salt; mix it with half a pint of milk or water, and beat it well with the rolling-pin, to incorporate the suet with the flour.
A plain suet crust in the Victorian proportion of roughly two parts flour to one part fat — stiffer and less rich than a modern shortcrust, because it has to hold a pudding together through hours of boiling or steaming.
- Quantities in modern termsHalf a pound of suet is 225 g; a pound and a quarter of flour is about 565 g, or roughly 4½ cups. Cassell's is a British book, so the half pint is an imperial half pint — 10 fl oz, or about 1¼ US cups — and you may not need all of it.
- Which flourUse plain (all-purpose) flour. A boiled pudding crust of this era was leavened only by steam and by air beaten in; if you want the lighter modern result, substitute self-raising flour or add 2 teaspoons baking powder to the plain flour.
- The suet itselfFresh beef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys, and it needs picking clean of membrane before chopping — the point of "pick and chop very fine" is that any skin left in will show as a tough streak. Packet shredded suet, beef or vegetarian, works directly and needs no preparation; grating a very cold block from the butcher is the next best thing.
- Keep everything coldThe fat must stay in distinct particles until the pudding hits the water, so that it melts in place and leaves the crust open. Chilled suet, cold liquid, and a light hand matter more than any other step here.
- On beating it with the rolling-pinThis is the instruction that dates the recipe. Victorian suet was chopped by hand and was uneven, so it was flattened into the flour. With shredded suet, stir the liquid in with a knife to a firm, just-cohesive dough and stop; extended beating develops gluten and gives a leathery crust.
- ConsistencyAim for a dough stiff enough to roll to about ¼ inch without tearing and to line a basin without slumping. Add the liquid gradually — flours vary, and a wet suet paste will not support a filling.
- CookingLine a greased pudding basin, fill, top with a lid of the same paste, then cover with pleated greaseproof paper and foil, or a floured cloth, and tie down. Steam or boil with the water no more than halfway up the basin: 1½ to 2 hours for a fruit pudding, 3 to 4 for steak and kidney.
- YieldThis quantity is generous — enough to line and cover a 2½ to 3 pint basin, serving six to eight. Halve it for a small household pudding.
Suet crust is the workhorse of the nineteenth-century English kitchen: cheap, filling, and cooked in a pot of water rather than an oven, which mattered in houses where the range was not lit all day. Its ancestor is the pudding boiled in a cloth, a technique generally traced in English cookery to the seventeenth century, when the pudding cloth freed cooks from stuffing mixtures into animal intestines and made "pudding" — sweet or savoury — a dish anyone with a hook and a cauldron could produce. Cassell's gives several versions of the paste under one heading, this being the plainer of them: it was assumed knowledge, a base a cook would build a dozen dinners on, from jam roly-poly to steak and kidney. Beef suet remained the standard fat until packet shredded suet, and later vegetarian versions, took over in the twentieth century.